Versus Local

On the road, general well-being is a complicated mesh of karmic gears, all of which must be humming and whirring smoothly to ensure smooth runnings. For example, there's cop karma, rental car karma, WiFi karma, digestive karma and gas prices karma. Those are only a few.

For two weeks, I was having a hell of a time with my Waffle House karma. It seemed like every time I stepped into the World's Leading Server, that yellow hut with the globe lighting, I was suddenly an undesirable unserviceable, despite the "house rules" that said they didn't discriminate against creed, color or tip size. It was almost as if they'd circulated my picture with the caption, "treat this guy like crap."

For instance, there was the location near Kansas City where I stopped for breakfast on January 2nd. I was the only customer there, and I took my regular seat at the counter. One employee organized silverware in the rack right in front of me, never stopping to acknowledge my presence. The line cook cleaned off the batter drippings from the station of four waffle irons, and the waitress in the corner took a cell-phone call.

Several minutes passed, and I couldn't stay polite anymore. "Am I going to get service here?"

Fool

People always seem so disappointed when the story isn't as simple as they apparently thought it was. In the eyes of some folks, I don't stand up to certain ideas of pure and perfect vagrancy.

"You never stay in hotels? You just sleep in the car?"

Actually, I stay in hotels on days off between games. There usually isn't anything going on hoops-wise on Fridays, unless I'm somewhere in the northeast. That's when I catch up on phone interviews, site programming, and answering e-mails. Those are all things that are easier to accomplish with a heavy door between oneself and the public, instead of at a Flying J where truck drivers are always coming up and asking how that Apple laptop is "working out."

"You're the guy who drives all over the country to games, like a college basketball rip-off of John Madden? Are you afraid of flying too?"

This One's For The Valley

This one's for the Valley, the Missouri Valley. This is a tribute to that switch of strong and landlocked America that only sees the sun an hour after the right coast does, whether Indiana saves daylight or not. Let the light shine from Lincoln's boyhood home to his license-plate Land, across Iowa and the region's namesake Show-Me state, into the brilliant corners of Nebraska and Kansas. This one's for the very center of the Central time zone.

This one's for Republican voters, for corn-miles, for playing in Peoria. This is also for the Kum & Go, a chain of gas stations so blissfully unaware of itself. It's a special shout-out to the "Burgers & Cream" in Carbondale, Illinois, and to the 50-year-old old-time Steak & Shake in Springfield, Missouri, the one with the sign on the side that says, "We Protect Your Health." To the Buffalo Wild Wings locations from end to end, and to "Ski," the lemony-orangey hometown beverage of Evansville, Indiana.

This is for the diners, for the buffets, for size 42 pants. This is for skinny white kids in black t-shirts in the parking lot of the Jo-Ann Fabrics store at 10 p.m., clouds of cigarette smoke hanging overhead like bored ghosts, all gathered around a pair of beaten and bruised Japanese automobiles from the early Nineties. There's an Evanescence CD playing loudly over a severely taxed and tinny-sounding speaker system. It's the major-label debut, the one with all the hits on it.

This is for the slow turn of the key, for the sputtering rev of the engine, for the eternal marriage of machinery and freedom. This is for backseat sex, for endless squirming and stray elbows and not quite getting the angle right, for dejection and disappointment. This is for swearing that one day... One day we're going to get out of here, Maureen, and we're never going to look back.

This is for never leaving. Ever.